Speaker: Chuncheng Liu, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Northeastern University

Numbers have become the universal language of modern governance. What happens when an authoritarian state attempts to quantify the moral worth of its citizens? Drawing from my fieldwork inside China’s social credit system bureaucracy, this talk reveals how a quantification system designed to enhance state legibility and control instead produces opacity, distortion, and disillusionment. I document the everyday politics of quantification governance through two tensions: first, between ambitious data collection goals and limited bureaucratic capacity, resulting in selective data production and widespread fabrication; second, between the state’s efforts to impose authoritative meanings on merit scores and citizens’ persistent reinterpretation and resistance. Through ethnographic observation, I show how grassroots bureaucrats and citizens collaborate in maintaining an elaborate performance of governance while privately acknowledging its futility. Yet the system persists, not because it achieves its stated objectives, but because it fulfills internal political functions—particularly advancing officials’ careers within China’s competitive bureaucratic hierarchy. By demonstrating how quantification systems demand constant social and organizational maintenance while generating institutional strain and symbolic contestation, this ethnography offers crucial insights into algorithmic governance worldwide—revealing how numbers designed as instruments of control transform into performative ends that ultimately govern the state more than society itself.